Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
With the proliferation of computing and networking technologies, an increasingly large number of business and personal transactions are performed online. Thus, people are providing personal information for a variety of purposes. In addition, indirect information about people and companies such as spending habits, geographic or demographic information, and similar data, collectively referred to as “Marketing Intelligence”, is available through various types of online service providers. Databases of collected “Market Intelligence” data have significant value, and firms that collect such databases are in the business of trying to maximize the realized value without losing value by letting others transfer too much data to themselves.
Some companies collect personal information for detailed background reports on individuals, such as email addresses, cell numbers, photographs and posts on social-network sites. Others offer what are known as listening services, which monitor in real time hundreds or thousands of news sources, blogs and websites to see what people are saying about specific products or topics. Many of these firms “scrape” data from search, social networking, and similar websites. To prevent others from using their data or provide customer security, an increasing number of websites are developing ways to prevent such mass data collection, meaning that such data sets become more valuable as it becomes harder to collect.